The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has lowered its expectations for how quickly the world economy will rebound from the current recession, Bloomberg reported.

In a new forecast that was released today, the IMF said the world economy would shrink 1.3 percent this year, down from its earlier forecast of 0.5 percent growth. Also, the IMF projected a global expansion of 1.9 percent next year, which is down from its January projection of 3 percent.

“The key factor determining the course of the downturn and recovery will be the rate of progress toward returning the financial sector to health,” the IMF said in its semiannual World Economic Outlook. “Even once the crisis is over, there will be a difficult transition period, with output growth appreciably below rates seen in the recent past.”

The revised outlook comes a day after the IMF calculated worldwide losses of $4.1 trillion by the end of 2010 from distressed loans and assets. “Financial strains in the mature markets will remain heavy well into 2010,” the report stated.

The IMF predicted that the U.S. economy will decrease by 2.8 percent this year before stalling next year.